Councilman to Propose Bill to Regulate Costumed Characters Soliciting in Times Square

Over the vocal objections of several Elmos, a few Mickey Mouses and a Buzz Lightyear, a member of the City Council announced legislation on Monday to regulate Times Square’s ubiquitous costumed characters and their occasionally aggressive solicitations.

A few rogues have been giving the characters a bad name lately, among them a Spider-Man caught on camera fighting with the police in broad daylight on West 42nd Street as a stunned Elmo looked on in horror.

Not far from the scene of that spectacle, Councilman Andy King of the Bronx said at a news conference on Monday that he wanted characters to be licensed by the city and to submit to background checks and that he would introduce a bill this week to institute those requirements.

Any effort to regulate the characters, though, is almost certain to raise issues of free speech, not to mention questions about just what sort of place Times Square should be, a generation after it began to shed some of its sketchy sensibility and morph into a more benign urban fun house.

At the news conference, Mr. King said the Spider-Man incident, which began when the character rejected a tourist’s tip as too small, had made clear to him and others that the characters had to be regulated, for their own sakes and for the protection of the public.

“Most of the people out here are hard-working, law-abiding men and women, but there have been a couple of bad actors, like the Elmo that kind of lost his mind,” he said, referring to a performer who was taken into police custody after shouting obscenities in 2012, “and we need to make sure that nobody in Times Square feels violated and that everyone is protected.”

But some of the people who play the characters said on Monday that they had not been consulted and were troubled by the proposal, and its implications for the people, mostly low-income, and mostly Latino, who work the jobs.

Mr. King was joined by several council members, officials from the Police Department and the president of the Times Square Alliance, a coalition of city government and local businesses concerned with improving the area.

The bill, if passed, would require all performers who cover or paint their faces to have a license, and to pay a $175 fee every two years.

Characters would also have to wear their licenses outside their costumes, and would not be allowed to stand in the street, solicit within five feet of a subway entrance or aggressively ask for donations. Violations of any of the bills’ rules could result in fines and civil action.

Mr. King said that this legislation would also protect the performers from hostile police action and that everybody would be safer “if we’re all using the same playbook.”

A spokesman for Melissa Mark-Viverito, the speaker of the Council, said she would be reviewing the legislation, but had not yet taken a position.

Last month, police officers in Times Square handed out fliers informing tourists that they did not have to pay the characters to take a picture.

Mr. King said that the proposed legislation would not violate anyone’s First Amendment right to free speech.

Jesse Choper, a professor of public law at the University of California at Berkeley, said that it was possible to regulate this sort of activity, but that it had to be done carefully. “People do have a right to talk to people,” Mr. Choper said, “and you do have a right, if you aren’t blocking anyone’s path, to say, ‘Would you consider giving me some money?’ ”

But, he said, speech can be regulated by time and place and manner. “If you carefully draft something to be specific, you can prohibit people from aggressively soliciting.”

Mr. King also said that this was not an immigration issue, or one targeted at Latino workers.

But an organization representing the characters, New York Artists United for a Smile, objected to the bill. They said they had not been asked to weigh in on the proposed bill, a contention disputed by Mr. King.

Alex Gomez, a spokesman for the organization, said that this bill would place a lot of burdens on the performers, and none on the Police Department. He also said that the $175 licensing fee was too expensive for the performers, who usually make about $60 to $80 per day.

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, said he hoped the issues could be worked out, and that his organization and Mr. King had no desire to banish the characters. “It’s Times Square,” he said, “We like quirky, we just don’t like creepy.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Councilman to Propose Bill to Regulate Costumed Characters Soliciting in Times Square. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe